Remember planking? The Harlem Shake? The Ice Bucket Challenge? Oh, the good old days when overly excessive internet trends had longevity, when memes and viral videos could remain in the popularity circuit for more than 24 hours and own entire months, if not seasons.
Nowadays, everything — including this very post — is here today, gone tomorrow. So, how do you extend the lifetime of your meme, video, challenge, or trend? By getting someone famous to join in on the fun, of course.
Our latest example of this is the #DriveByDunkChallenge. The premise and course of action is simple: A random car drives up to a random driveway with a basketball hoop, and the passenger or the driver exits the car and runs up to dunk on the hoop before driving away. It’s really quite an entertaining video formula that combines casual trespassing with the most popular finishing move in basketball.
The first of these videos, per Instagram’s search engine, was posted by user @gman_pcbarbershop on June 27, 2016, and showed a measly dunk on what looked like at most a 7-foot rim.
Since then, there have been 532 such posts, and though many of them were reposts, the competing videos got better and better. There’s been a couple of solid tomahawk-style dunks. A valid 360-attempt by a kid wearing a Team USA T-shirt. (Has Gregg Popovich called yet?) And a full-on dunking tour of the local neighborhood, including a bounce pass off the garage wall toward the end.
The video fad was given a boost this week when Anthony Davis pulled up to a driveway playing Lil Wayne and sipping a Red Bull (yes, Red Bull). I guess caffeine and taurine are essential ingredients to a drive-by dunk.
I don’t know what’s best here: That Davis doesn’t even jump or move his feet off the ground, that he looks around the street nervously like a child who is about to get caught red-handed, or that he — thank God — didn’t get injured.
Pelicans fans, you can breathe. For now.
I can’t wait until DeMarcus Cousins feels the need to one-up the Brow, setting off a chain reaction of videos by former Kentucky guys dunking on random driveway hoops, while LeBron dunks on a house that will be instantly Google Maps’d by the internet to see if it’s in Cleveland, Miami, or L.A. This all ends with John Calipari dunking on a 6-foot rim, doesn’t it? Great.